Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

The cold was so clear and so clean that it felt as if we were cutting it with our bodies like knives. The frosted gravel of the parking lot gritted harshly under his heavy boots and under my shoes. The moon, full and bloated, looked down on us with a vapid eye. It was faintly ringed, suggesting bad weather on the way. The sky was as black as a night in hell. We left tiny dwarfed shadows behind our feet in the monochrome glare of a single sodium light set high on a pole beyond the parked rigs. Our breath plumed the air in short bursts. The trucker turned to me, his gloved fists balled.

“Okay, you son-of-a-bitch,” he said.

I seemed to be swelling—my whole body seemed to be swelling. Somehow, numbly, I knew that my intellect was about to be eclipsed by an invisible something that I had never suspected might be in me. It was terrifying—but at the same time I welcomed it, desired it, lusted for it. In that last instant of coherent thought it seemed that my body had become a stone pyramid or a cyclone that could sweep everything in front of it like colored pick-up sticks. The trucker seemed small, puny, insignificant. I laughed at him. I laughed, and the sound was as black and as bleak as that moonstruck sky overhead.

He came at me swinging his fists. I batted down his right, took his left on the side of my face without feeling it, and then kicked him in the guts. The air barfed out of him in a white cloud. He tried to back away, holding himself and coughing.

I ran around in back of him, still laughing like some farmer’s dog barking at the moon, and I had pounded him three times before he could make even a quarter turn—the neck, the shoulder, one red ear.

He made a yowling noise, and one of his flailing hands brushed my nose. The fury that had taken me over mushroomed and I kicked him again, bringing my foot up high and hard, like a punter. He screamed into the night and I heard a rib snap. He folded up and I jumped him.

At the trial one of the other truck drivers testified I was like a wild animal. And I was. I can’t remember much of it, but I can remember that, snarling and growling at him like a wild dog.

I straddled him, grabbed double handfuls of his greasy hair, and began to rub his face into the gravel. In the flat glare of the sodium light his blood seemed black, like beetle’s blood.

“Jesus, stop itI” somebody yelled.

Hands grabbed my shoulders and pulled me off I saw whirling faces and I struck at them.

The trucker was trying to creep away. His face was a staring mask of blood from which his dazed eyes peered. I began to kick him, dodging away from the others, grunting with satisfaction each time I connected on him.

He was beyond fighting back. All he knew was to try to get away. Each time I kicked him his eyes would squeeze closed, like the eyes of a tortoise, and he would halt. Then he would start to crawl again. He looked stupid. I decided I was going to kill him. I was going to kick him to death. Then I would kill the rest of them—all but Nona.

I kicked him again and he flopped over on his back and looked up at me dazedly.

“Uncle,” he croaked. “I cry Uncle. Please. Please—” I knelt down beside him, feeling the gravel bite into my knees through my thin jeans.

“Here you are, handsome,” I whispered. “Here’s your uncle.” I hooked my hands onto his throat.

Three of them jumped me all at once and knocked me off him. I got up, still grinning, and started toward them. They backed away, three big men, all of them scared green.

And it clicked off.

Just like that it clicked off and it was just me, standing in the parking lot of Joe’s Good Eats, breathing hard and feeling sick and horrified.

I turned and looked back toward the diner. The girl was there; her beautiful features were lit with triumph. She raised one fist to shoulder height in salute like the one those black guys gave at the Olympics that time.

I turned back to the man on the ground. He was still trying to crawl away, and when I approached him his eyeballs rolled fearfully.

“Don’t you touch him!” one of his friends cried.

I looked at them, confused. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to… to hurt him so bad. Let me help – “

“You get out of here, that’s what you do,” the short-order cook said. He was standing in front of Nona at the foot of the steps, clutching a greasy spatula in one hand. “I’m calling the cops.”

“Hey, man, he was the guy who started it! He—”

“Don’t give me any of your lip, you lousy queer,” he said, backing up. “All I know is you just about killed that guy. I’m calling the cops!” He dashed back inside.

“Okay,” I said to nobody in particular. “Okay, that’s good, okay.” I had left my rawhide gloves inside, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to go back in and get them. I put my hands in my pockets and started to walk back to the interstate access road. I figured my chances of hitching a ride before the cops picked me up were about one in ten. My ears were freezing and I felt sick to my stomach- Some purty night.

“Wait! Hey, wait!” I turned around. It was her, running to catch up with me, her hair flying out behind her.

“You were wonderful!” she said. “Wonderful!”

“I hurt him bad,” I said dully. “I never did anything like that before.”

“I wish you’d killed him!” I blinked at her in the frosty light.

“You should have heard the things they were saying about me before you came in.

Laughing in that big, brave, dirty way—haw, haw, lookit the little girl out so long after dark.

Where you going, honey? Need a lift? I’ll give you a ride if you’ll give me a ride. Damn!” She glared back over her shoulder as if she could strike them dead with a sudden bolt from her dark eyes. Then she turned them on me, and again it seemed like that searchlight had been turned on in my mind. “My name’s Nona. I’m coming with you.”

“Where? To jail?” I tugged at my hair with both hands. “With this, the first guy who gives us a ride is apt to be a state cop. That cook meant what he said about calling them.”

“I’ll hitch. You stand behind me. They’ll stop for me. They stop for a girl, if she’s pretty.” I couldn’t argue with her about that and didn’t want to. Love at first sight? Maybe not. But it was something. Can you get that wave?

“Here,” she said, “you forgot these.” She held out my gloves.

She hadn’t gone back inside, and that meant she’d had them all along. She’d known she was coming with me. It gave me an eerie feeling. I put on my gloves and we walked up the access road to the turnpike ramp.

She was right about the ride. We got one with the first car that swung onto the ramp.

We didn’t say anything else while we waited, but it seemed as if we did. I won’t give you a load of bull about ESP and that stuff; you know what I’m talking about. You’ve felt it yourself if you’ve ever been with someone you were really close to, or if you’ve taken one of those drugs with initials for a name. You don’t have to talk. Communication seems to shift over to some high-frequency emotional band. A twist of the hand does it all. We were strangers. I only knew her first name and now that I think back I don’t believe I ever told her mine at all. But we were doing it. It wasn’t love. I hate to keep repeating that, but I feel I have to. I wouldn’t dirty that word with whatever we had—not after what we did, not after Castle Rock, not after the dreams.

A high, wailing shriek filled the cold silence of the night, rising and falling.

“That’s an ambulance I think,” I said.

“Yes.” Silence again. The moon’s light was fading behind a thickening membrane of cloud. I thought the ring around the moon hadn’t lied; we would have snow before the night was over.

Lights poked over the hill.

I stood behind her without having to be told She brushed her hair back and raised that beautiful face. As I watched the car signal for the entrance ramp I was swept with a feeling of unreality—it was unreal that this beautiful girl had elected to come with me, it was unreal that I had beaten a man to the point where an ambulance had to be called for him, it was unreal to think I might be in jail by morning. Unreal. I felt caught in a spiderweb. But who was the spider?

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